Questions

My hardest question (which has come both from others, but most often from myself), is similar to what others have already posted thus far: Why do I do what I do? Five years ago, I was asked this question before a fiction reading--I said, "I just like to tell stories, I guess." But if that was ever true, it isn't anymore, and that has made the question much harder to answer.

Because I don't like to tell stories. I like words. It isn't the story, the what happens next of it all, that fascinates me, it's language--sound and rhythm and the un-fixedness of meaning. So I write because I like language? This has always seemed insufficient (and perhaps linked to the problem of saying "I am a writer" rather than "I am an artist," because really, who among us isn't a writer, in the sense that we are able to write, and exercise this skill?). Really, I don't know the answer to this question. I would like to say it is because I was destined to, I can't do anything else, but I suspect deep down it may be because I make myself do it, because hard as it sometimes is, and much as I sometimes don't want to, there are questions I still haven't answered, and ones I haven't asked.

I forget this often in graduate school, when the next deadline or assignment is looming, when I have 24 freshman research papers to grade. And it's hard sometimes, to make myself. But I always come back, again and again, because the one thing I think I know is that I don't want to stop.